Gormongous

You're right, I don't know how it feels to be Ken Levine. What I do know is how it feels to be laid off because my boss was bad at his job. I know how it feels for me to lose my job and for him to keep his. So yeah, I'm predisposed more toward one kind of sympathy than another. I'm sure Levine has it hard, yeah, but how is this not a consequence of every decision he's made up until now and hence his own doing? Why are we not qualified to say that, unfortunate though it may be?

Super Long Toes HD!

No worries, it's not a bad thing. I just love idioms and "long toes" is great.

First Dota 2 thread post from me, to ask if this is an idiom somewhere? I'm super curious.

The game punishes you so hard for sudden jumps in population, I'm not exactly sure how or why. I had 15,000 food in my storehouse and enough production for a village of twice my current size, which was around a hundred and fifty, but admitting twenty nomads crashed my economy so bad that it took five years just to regain previous population levels. Do they just sit around and eat for a set period of time before they start to work? If so, how can I prevent that?

Okay, I finally have enough time to write down some thoughts. Things I Love about Banished: The theme works so well for me. A subsistence-level medieval town, slowly growing as you gain more space and more people to do something besides gather wood and food. Options in the early game are great. Do you launch right into farming or do you build up fishing and hunting? Do you clear-cut or build sustainable stuff? Watching my fields grow and get harvested could consume my life. Things I Don't Love about Banished: ​Though I do love the theme, the setting is pretty sterile. It's always a wilderness with a river, populated by people with gibberish European names. It touches upon medievalism without capturing it, save for the harsh stakes of survival. Options flatten out fast once your town passes a hundred people. You need farms. You need diverse crops. You can have some gatherers and fishermen to spice up the diet, but there's no decision to be made past a certain point, unless you're perverse and shooting for achievements. Taciturn interface makes for magical thinking. Do doctors passively improve the health of your town? How many laborers are optimal? How much do paved roads really improve travel time if the AI pathing still cuts corners whenever possible? What controls hunting/gathering rates in forests? When and how long do you leave fields fallow? Should the theoretical maximum of workers in a given building ever be increased? Why is all useful information about a town hidden behind an expensive and otherwise (mostly) useless building? Okay, the last one's not really magical thinking, but still. God, I hate that one ninety-year-old man living alone in a house at the center of town. That house could have a family in it if he'd just die. Basically, I think it's a great game that needs a better endgame and a deep usability pass. I'm enjoying it immensely right now, but I'm pouring a lot of my gaming time into satisfying superstitions, which doesn't drive me toward the only goal of "see how large a town can be sustained."

I understand his disappointment, though. It sucks when a video game takes an independently interesting historical moment and then dresses it up in video game trappings. See, for instance, every single Assassin's Creed and Total War game. They're not meant to be historical simulators, but that's still what lets me down most about them.

Hah! You have the same problem I did. You didn't build enough houses for children to move out of their parents' houses and have their own kids, so now the settlement's doomed. Why there isn't an alert somewhere that tells you there'll be no kids ten years down the line for a lack of suitable housing is beyond me. As far as I can tell, couples have a kid if they live in the same house alone (or with their children) and are both between the ages of 10 (gross) and 30. That's it. It's fully possible to build thirty houses right away and have your town collapse the moment the third generation is born, because there'll be so many mouths that don't work.

I'm going to make a longer post later, but you have to get the town hall built to have year-by-year stat tracking. It helps your efficiency a lot, so I'm not terribly thrilled with hiding it behind a (relatively) expensive building.

Man, good show, Sean. I was going to make a similar post about human behavior being political behavior and hence the expectation of apolitical art really being the expectation of inhuman art, but you said it all. I hear what you're saying, but I think you're misinterpreting and underselling Danielle and most feminist commentators in general. "Bravely Default has some sexism in it" is different from "Bravely Default is sexist" and very different from "The makers of Bravely Default are sexist." There is no danger in calling out sexism. Well, maybe not, thanks to the internet hate machine, but at least there's no risk to the game itself in calling out sexism. At worst, if nothing else comes of it, doing so raises awareness that, even in a good game, sexist elements don't get a pass. They get called out and talked about, no matter what. Maybe I'm just not familiar with specific instances you've found troublesome, but sexism is superficial, so calling out "superficially" sexist elements like cheesecake box art or a bloody bikini-clad torso preorder bonus or Catwoman being called a "bitch" is not somehow letting real sexist stuff get a pass. Again, if you're saying that you wish Danielle had elaborated further on sexism in Bravely Default because you're curious to hear her opinion, my bad for typing all of this. But if you're saying that Danielle needs to justify why she, a woman, finds something sexist, or that she should only be calling out truly hateful misogyny, as if there's any useful way to distinguish the motives and consequences of any given example of sexism, then I think I might need you to elaborate further on just why that is.

Unrelated to anything ever said on this forum, I could live the rest of my doubtlessly short life without having to hear another straight white dude play out the "slippery slope" fallacy because he wants to make those talking about his privilege look ridiculous. Bonus points if he accidentally brings up disability rights or fat acceptance as an unthinkable extreme that would make any and all discourse unworkable. Actually, the link Clyde just posted had a recent XKCD that says it better in the comments: Okay, carry on, everyone.

Joking aside, I like how he points out the overlap between how Levine writes his villains and how Levine presents himself in that recent statement. I think it's a salient point about how Levine seems to perceive leadership and power, albeit overshadowed by knee-jerk misogyny.

It's sad, because I like the other half of his post, but now I don't want to because ugh.

Build them houses, people. Nothing like having a thriving town of fifty die out one by one over the course of a decade because their drowsy god never realized they didn't have enough room for kids to move out and have their own kids. Actually, right now I'm looking at the remaining eight, all at least sexagenarians, each living alone in their own house, and finding it pretty hilarious. Who's going to the graveyard next, Monserra the eighty-five year old farmer or Lett the seventy-two year old woodcutter?

After months of searching, I found a print-and-play publisher who's willing to make and sell me a copy of Ilya's gorgeous Dune (1979) redesign. I now begin the lengthy process of convincing myself that it's worth $120 to buy an out-of-print masterpiece that's lovingly handmade by some dude in Washington instead of a machine in China.

This is not me being anything, but I love that, since the Games Giveaway thread was moved to Multiplayer Networking to discourage lurkers, the Gifts thread has just become the new Games Giveaway thread.

I added mine, too, and felt bad for a moment that I don't have an XBL or Origin account to pimp out on my entry.

I agree with Twig? "We want to close Irrational, release a press statement that you're forming a new studio out of creative boredom so that it looks like your doing" isn't exactly as far of a fall as some, but it's still a fall. Like many people have said, Levine doesn't have the power to close a company he doesn't own, so this isn't his decision, even if the way he passes it off as his decision comes off as increasingly callous and out of touch the more I think about it.

Yeah, that's a great way of putting what I was struggling to say. The way things played out, this is all obviously a fig leaf or a smoke screen or a blind for something else, but it's anyone's guess what that something is.

Yeah, I agree with all of that. If racism and sexism were just products of hate, it'd be really easy for everyone to eliminate it from their own lives by cutting out every hateful person they knew, but I can still be among good friends, hear one of them say something's retarded or gay, often the first time they've said so in twenty years, and feel the full weight of ten thousand years of bullshit come crashing down. It's not usually individual hate, although it's important to remember that such individuals do exist, but it's certainly a deep cultural and societal hate, subliminated and diffused to the point that it's impossible to recognize unless you work really hard all the time, which no one can, so we have to help each other spot what's fucked up about what we all make and do. For instance, I really like calling stuff "lame", to the point that I don't always notice I'm doing it unless other people point it out, and I consider myself pretty damn conscientious. It's a screwy world. I also agree with Darth Bator that I am worried about legitimate racist and sexist critiques someday becoming diluted into straw men for trolls to knock over and burn, but right now that's a problem I'd rather have than accidental minstrel-show influences on video game art.

Yeah... This is shocking news, like everyone's been saying, but at least for me, it's hard not to perceive it as a golden parachute for Levine. Why didn't he just reform Irrational from the inside? All I can think is that either he didn't want to do it himself, which makes him seem oblivious and self-centered, or 2K was really the one pressing the button, in which case it's merely uncomfortable that he gets to stick around with a select few. I can't know what's gone through Levine's head, but it does seem as though the easiest answer is that 2K wanted Irrational gone but didn't want to take the PR hit from shuttering a popular studio, so they kept Levine and the goodwill he represents while still getting to shoot the money pit that he'd built in the head. Possibly they also sincerely hope that Levine can work wonders with a much smaller and more dedicated team, too. I don't know how I feel about it, but I think I might tend towards JP's reaction.

Well, shit away! But honestly, while I understand whatever concerns anyone might have about something like this hijacking the discourse on every game that comes alone, I think that "social justice warriors" flinging death threats are like welfare queens and bra-burning man-haters and job-stealing illegal immigrants and wife-raping Negroes... They no doubt exist, but their existence is given disproportionate credence by the public at large, who see them to mean something more than what they do, which is that no ideology, however noble and progressive, is free of monsters and idiots. I don't mean to say that that's what you're doing here, Darth Bator, but there are some scary implications behind any request not to talk about bigotry or oppression out of a sense of decorum. EDIT: Dammit, Bjorn. Stop being better than me.

No, no light, only heavy.

Dude, go be stupid in Titanfall thread or something. This here's serious business.

I would also like an IRCCloud invite, if Ysbreker hasn't been drained dry already.